Even at the second time of asking, digital TV has been a commercial flop. That's not surprising when taxpayer-subsidised broadcasters are given valuable spectrum. It's time Ofcom admitted this and gave Sky the chance to revitalise the market.

New guidelines on web accessibility are nearing completion after years of delay, according to the body behind them. But outspoken critic Joe Clark says the guidelines will be ignored when they are published.

Less than a month since changing its voice menus to something more "matey", Orange has called Ruth back into the recording studio to up the tone a little, and give customers a better class of voice menu.

Optiarc, the optical drive joint venture between Sony and NEC, has taken the wraps off its first Blu-ray Disc playback drive for laptops, claiming the machine will allow notebook makers to equip mid-range models with the next-gen disc format.

How is AMD's Phenom processor roll-out shaping up? According to the latest roadmap leak, expect three of the CPUs to appear this year, all of them in the 9000 series. Gamer-oriented FX parts won't debut until next year.

One of our favourite notions here at Vulture Central is that of the flying car. Ideally this would be a true sci-fi-style job, backed up by an equally puissant automated air-traffic infrastructure. In such a machine you could simply jump into your car outside your house, quietly lift off vertically, fly somewhere even in bad visibility and congested airspace, and set down again equally vertically. Then you could drive/taxi your astounding hover vehicle into the garage, underground carpark or wherever - or simply park it on the street.

Anyone still working in app dev who was around before BritPop will remember the debate on how the likes of Object Orientation and Corba were going to revolutionize distributed computing and the way we interact with systems.

Yesterday's story showing evidence that Microsoft has placed Draconian caps on the number of Hotmail recipients who can receive an email prompted a message from reader Jeff Willis. He says Hotmail routinely blocks mass emails his company, MIS Sciences Corporation, sends on behalf of universities and government agencies.

First, a bit of history. In the early 1970s, IBM had two separate operating system development teams competing for the future of the mainframe. The establishment - represented by MVS - offered continuity from the age of the 360.

Ohio's Department of Administrative Services says it's learned its lesson following the pilfering of a tape that contained personal data belonging to more than 130,000 people. And to prove it the agency is docking a whole week's holiday time from the man who failed to ensure the security of the information.